Personal experience here, my current laptop has a CPU that is somewhat weak or equal the one you're getting, Ivy Bridge i7 at 3.2GHz with Turbo Boost -- however I have 4 physical cores while the low power i7's has only 2 cores, not sure if this changes anything, especially in Dolphin. I have finished both Paper Mario TTYD and Super Paper Mario in this computer and I can say these games are lightweight and should run fullspeed with that computer too.
The only issue you may get here is Bounding Box emulation: Paper Mario games use and abuse of this feature for some graphical effects and it can give you some performance hits depending of the scenario. I'm not completely sure but at the moment Dolphin can emulate bounding box either by hardware (fast and lightweight) or by software (needs a lot of CPU power). The last thing I read (some Pull Request at GitHub I think), bounding box emulation doesn't work with Intel HD Graphics and that would give you a performance hit since it would fall back to software emulation but if you use a compatible GPU you shouldn't have any performance issue and the games should run fine and smooth...
Edit: nevermind, just saw the laptp you plan buying has an nVidia GPU, it's not the fastest (in fact it may be slower than Intel HD 4400 in some scenarios) but it should fully support hardware bounding box emulation. Paper mario games will run fullspeed then, don't worry
The only issue you may get here is Bounding Box emulation: Paper Mario games use and abuse of this feature for some graphical effects and it can give you some performance hits depending of the scenario. I'm not completely sure but at the moment Dolphin can emulate bounding box either by hardware (fast and lightweight) or by software (needs a lot of CPU power). The last thing I read (some Pull Request at GitHub I think), bounding box emulation doesn't work with Intel HD Graphics and that would give you a performance hit since it would fall back to software emulation but if you use a compatible GPU you shouldn't have any performance issue and the games should run fine and smooth...
Edit: nevermind, just saw the laptp you plan buying has an nVidia GPU, it's not the fastest (in fact it may be slower than Intel HD 4400 in some scenarios) but it should fully support hardware bounding box emulation. Paper mario games will run fullspeed then, don't worry
Avell A70 MOB: Core i7-11800H, GeForce RTX 3060, 32 GB DDR4-3200, Windows 11 (Insider Preview)
ASRock Z97M OC Formula: Pentium G3258, GeForce GT 440, 16 GB DDR3-1600, Windows 10 (22H2)
ASRock Z97M OC Formula: Pentium G3258, GeForce GT 440, 16 GB DDR3-1600, Windows 10 (22H2)